Future large optical telescopes require adaptive optics (AO) systems whose deformable mirrors (DM) have ever more degrees of freedom. This paper describes advances that are made in a project aimed to design a new AO system that is extendible to meet tomorrow's specifications. Advances on the mechanical design are reported in a companion paper [6272-75], whereas this paper discusses the controller design aspects. The numerical complexity of controller designs often used for AO scales with the fourth power in the diameter of the telescope's primary mirror. For future large telescopes this will undoubtedly become a critical aspect. This paper demonstrates the feasibility of solving this issue with a distributed controller design. A distributed framework will be introduced in which each actuator has a separate processor that can communicate with a few direct neighbors. First, the DM will be modeled and shown to be compatible with the framework. Then, adaptive turbulence models that fit the framework will be shown to adequately capture the spatio-temporal behavior of the atmospheric disturbance, constituting a first step towards a distributed optimal control. Finally, the wave-front reconstruction step is fitted into the distributed framework such that the computational complexity for each processor increases only linearly with the telescope diameter.
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